Group Attachments and Public Support for War.

Recent research has demonstrated that attachments and enmities to salient social groupings in society shape political understanding and behavior on domestic issues. In this paper, I argue that beliefs about those groups to which individuals feel loyalty or hostility also structure their attitudes in the realm of foreign policy. The effects of group loyalties differ from the effects of partisanship because long-standing group attachments lead to sizable, but stable differences in opinion on war. As I demonstrate, these differences are resistant to alternations in political messages and persist even in the face of massive changes within the political environment, such as the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Group attachments therefore give individuals the agency to form their own opinions independent of political leadership. In these ways, group-based differences provide a bedrock structure to public opinion. In this paper, I draw primarily on data from World War II – a time when internal ethnic divisions were a highly visible part of the social sphere in the United States. However, though the power of groups was especially strong in World War II, group-based differences can provide structure to citizens’ understanding of foreign policy more generally. Thus, to demonstrate the generality of the group-based perspective, I look to other cases involving group-based thinking – namely a recent controversy involving foreign trade – to demonstrate that feelings toward domestic groups can structure opinion on foreign policy more generally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]